Four hundred years on, Mexico’s oldest Black community struggles to survive

Climate change and poverty threaten to wash away the coastal community founded by fugitive slaves.

Oaxaca, Mexico – Outside Mama Cointa’s home where she has lived for almost all her life, guests have gathered to celebrate her 101st birthday. Her friend Victor steadies her quivering hand with his own while she tilts a ribbon-wrapped bouquet of wilting flowers to her nose. Her son Don Amado ushers visitors inside their family home.

“Our home is the last of its kind here,” Amado said, ducking underneath a sheet of thatched palm leaves hanging over the entranceway to a windowless, one-room house, where he was raised by his mother, Mama “Cointa” Chavez Velazco, in the village of Tecoyame, Oaxaca.

“But it may not be around next year. There is no support to help us, no money to maintain it as the climate becomes more extreme and threatens us more,” Amado added, before stealing a glance at his mother, whose milky blue eyes have begun to flood with tears.

“We are forgotten.”

Known as “El Redondo”, Mama Cointa’s house is an icon of the Costa Chica, the “short coast”, which spans approximately 400km (250 miles) across two states that straddle the Pacific Ocean. More Afro-Mexicans live here than anywhere else in this country of nearly 130 million people. Longer and harsher dry seasons in recent years have produced intense droughts in Tecoyame and nearby towns, hardening and cracking the land and leaving the parched soil unable to absorb the water from Mexico’s rainy season. Instead, the rainwater careens off the concrete-like surface, splashing up against the village’s homes and weakening their foundations.